OKINAWA, THE FINAL BATTLE, Part Three: ‘Floating Chrysanthemums’

By the time the Fifth Fleet entered the waters surrounding Okinawa, pilots purposely crashing their aircraft into ships was not a new phenomenon.

During the battle of Midway in 1942, an American B-26 bomber that was crippled by battle damage made an attempt to steer into the Japanese carrier Akagi. (It just missed the ship’s island before hitting the water.) And throughout the war, Japanese pilots had shown a willingness to crash their planes into enemy ships.

By late 1944, however, the Japanese high command faced a serious dilemma. U.S. submarines were effectively sinking her merchant marine while strategic bombing rendered port after port unusable, thus depriving flight schools of vital fuel. With the Allies closing in, Japan no longer had the time nor the resources to adequately train pilots to replace the elite cadre of veteran fliers who’d been killed in action during the course of the war. As such, most Japanese pilots sent off to battle had barely two months of flying time. They were pounced on by American fliers with ten times that amount of training, flying superb fighters like the Corsair or Hellcat, and already with combat experience in smaller operations.

No matter how many planes the Japanese sent up in a conventional bombing/torpedo attack against U.S. ships, the result was usually a one-sided debacle. (The Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, for example, during which American fighter jocks shot down over 400 Japanese aircraft in one day, is remembered as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”)

Bowing to a combination of reality, desperation, and fanatical devotion to Dai Nippon and her divine emperor, Japanese planners led by Vice Adm. Ōnishi Takijirō, came up with a radical approach. What had once been a random act of self-sacrifice was transformed into a formal and lethal method of attack by the Imperial Navy. The Special Attack Corps was created to train pilots to use their aircraft as guided missiles. This group of fliers would be the modern version of the typhoon, or kamikaze (“divine wind”), that wiped out the Mongol invasion fleet en route to Japan in 1281.

The first organized suicide attacks occurred during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. From October 1944 to January 1945, during the Philippines campaign, kamikazes sank 22 Allied ships and damaged 112, prompting Ōnishi to conclude, “The men who can save the country are not military or political leaders. The salvation of Japan lies in the young people of twenty-five to thirty-five — or even younger — and their body-hitting spirit.”

By 1945, with most of the IJN in Davey Jones’ locker, greater reliance than ever was placed on these young pilots willing to die for their god emperor and become kikusui (“floating chrysanthemums”) in their national defense. With a final sake toast before taking off to their deaths, the kamikaze pilots sang their war song:

The airman’s color is the color of the cherry blossom
See, oh see, how the blossoms fall on the hills of Yoshino
If we are born proud sons of the Yamato race, let us die
Let us die with triumph, fighting in the sky.

On April 7, the first waves of suicide planes, Kikusui No. 1, lifted off from bases on Kyushu and Formosa and headed towards the enemy flotilla off Okinawa. A typical formation was three suicide planes, usually loaded with bombs or torpedoes for greater explosive effect, one fighter escort, and one observer. They would repeatedly change altitude to confuse monitoring U.S. picket ships, drop aluminum chaff to baffle radar signatures, and come in from many different directions to disperse CAP fighters and anti-aircraft. Untrained in air tactics, they were instructed to go straight in on a sprint at their targets.

And so it was that while the Tenth Army was still enjoying its brief calm before the storm on Okinawa, 60 miles out to sea, a new form of warfare would reach its apogee; the Big Blue Fleet supporting the landings with its dozens of carriers would be the primary target.

Beginning on April 7, the Navy found itself under attack from all sides by Japanese aircraft. The first line of defense was the CAP fighters. They rolled into the mass formations of inbound enemy planes and proceeded to shred one after another. They noticed that many didn’t even use evasive tactics but kept on at full throttle, heading straight into the fleet. (Fortunately, the superlative Corsair — arguably the finest piston-engine fighter of the war — could chase many of them down). Then, the outer ring of picket destroyers and destroyer escorts sent up sheets of anti-aircraft as the enemy aircraft either passed overhead on their way to the carriers or opted to aim for their small tormentors for a more certain kill. Given their size, Destroyers were targeted and sunk the most, thus fulfilling the Kikusui pledge, “One Plane, One Ship”. If the attackers managed to pierce the CAP and outer ring of AA, it was up to the gunners on the carriers, battleships, and cruisers to send up a curtain of lead to try and beat back what they saw as madmen flying those human bombs and coming straight at them.

The adrenaline-pumped American crews had never seen anything like it. During the first and most numerous Kikusui, over 700 Japanese planes roared in from every direction; 355 were kamikazes, while the rest were either escorts, observers, or conventional bombers.

Capt. Frank Manson, whose destroyer USS Laffey was hit several times but managed to stay afloat, recalled: “So many things were happening and so quickly that it was a little bit like a big boxer in a ring being hit to the chin and the side of the face and the body and everywhere else because we were catching it from so many different angles.”

Amid the chaos of swerving ships and gun blasts of every caliber filling the sky with black clouds of shell bursts, the beleaguered sailors could gauge the danger by which guns were firing. Writes historian Joseph Wheelan, “The firing of 5 inch guns [firing proximity-fused shells at medium range] meant that kamikazes were still a distance away. When the 40mm Bofor auto-cannons joined in, a kamikaze was targeting a sailor’s ship, and the sound of the 20mm guns was the signal to take cover.”

Capt. Manson continued: “You were praying that you would survive whatever the kind of explosion would come about. Your whole life flashed in front of you very quickly because you didn’t know if it would be minutes or even seconds before your life was snuffed out.”

The noise and chaos, as well as the physical and emotional strain on sailors who were always on high alert, was exhausting. The fight against the kamikazes was so grueling and mentally straining that some men broke under the pressure. Manson remembered, “One man was in a forty-millimeter mount and he’d been fighting against quite a number of planes that had come in but we had been hit in his area two or three times and all of a sudden with nobody understanding why he just yelled out ‘It’s hot today!’ and jumped over the side. And that was the last we ever saw of him.”

Lt. Charles Burrows on board USS Tennessee likened the helplessness one felt when they saw that a kamikaze was going to get through to “sitting in the middle of a railroad track while watching the locomotive come at you at 200 miles per hour. You’re certain it’s curtains.”

The suicide attacks were a daily event when the weather allowed; they came in the forms of fighters, dive bombers, twin-engine bombers, and even the rocket-propelled Ohka flying bombs, called “bakas” or “fools” by the Americans. Some attacks were individual sorties, and others, like Kikusui No. 2 on April 12, consisted of 380 planes, 185 of which were kamikazes. Throughout the campaign, bomb-laden aircraft screamed out of the sky and slammed into Allied ships, causing terrible destruction and inflicting heavy casualties. Between April 7 and June 22, over 1,400 suicide planes would sortie against Allied shipping both at sea and in the Hagushi sector. By the time the battle was over, the Navy would suffer 36 ships sunk, 368 damaged, with some 5,000 sailors dead and as many wounded; 15 times the number killed at Midway.

Beyond the deaths and destruction, probably the worst aspect of the kamikaze raids, given the nature of their attacks with planes laden with fuel and bombs, were the ghastly wounds suffered by the survivors. Bert Cooper, a Navy corpsman, treated the sole survivor of a gun mount hit by a crashed plane. He was burned so badly, Cooper recalled, that “the only thing pink you could see were his lips…he was just covered with black burns all over.” The dying boy whispered to him, “Doc, I’m an orphan. Who will remember me?” Cooper fought back tears. “I’ll remember you,” he promised. “Every day of my life.

The IJN took the concept of the suicide attack in perhaps the ultimate expression of the Japanese militarists’ desperation when they dispatched the 72,000-ton battleship Yamato, the largest ever constructed, from Kyushu to steam for Okinawa. As Japan was severely lacking in fuel, the officers and crew on board knew this would be a one-way mission. The great warship was ordered to sail into the waters off Hagushi and beach herself while training her massive 18.1-inch guns and a wall of 6 and 5-inch secondary weapons on the landing zone to act as an artillery platform until destroyed. But she was soon picked up and trailed by U.S. submarines, and Mitscher’s carriers turned into the wind to launch over 300 planes to intercept her just 120 miles out from Japan.

On April 7, as if to declare once and for all that the age of the big battleship had passed into history, over 300 U.S. Helldiver bombers dove down on her from 20,000 feet while Avenger torpedo planes skimmed the surface to drop their “pickle” into the water that was frothing with AA from Yamato and her destroyer escorts. After a punishing raid that hit Yamato with no fewer than 11 torpedoes and six bombs, the ship capsized and exploded, taking 3,055 of her 3,332 crew, along with her captain and fleet commander, with her to the bottom of the sea.

Although the U.S. Navy made quick work of the last expression of Japanese sea power, on land, the fight for Okinawa was degenerating into a gruesome battle of attrition for which every yard was costing the lives of young GIs. And as April turned to May, it would be the Marines up next to enter the kill zone.

The battle was far from over. And then the rains came.

* * *

Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. Follow him on Substack and X/Twitter.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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By the time the Fifth Fleet entered the waters surrounding Okinawa, pilots purposely crashing their aircraft into ships was not a new phenomenon.

During the battle of Midway in 1942, an American B-26 bomber that was crippled by battle damage made an attempt to steer into the Japanese carrier Akagi. (It just missed the ship’s island before hitting the water.) And throughout the war, Japanese pilots had shown a willingness to crash their planes into enemy ships.

By late 1944, however, the Japanese high command faced a serious dilemma. U.S. submarines were effectively sinking her merchant marine while strategic bombing rendered port after port unusable, thus depriving flight schools of vital fuel. With the Allies closing in, Japan no longer had the time nor the resources to adequately train pilots to replace the elite cadre of veteran fliers who’d been killed in action during the course of the war. As such, most Japanese pilots sent off to battle had barely two months of flying time. They were pounced on by American fliers with ten times that amount of training, flying superb fighters like the Corsair or Hellcat, and already with combat experience in smaller operations.

No matter how many planes the Japanese sent up in a conventional bombing/torpedo attack against U.S. ships, the result was usually a one-sided debacle. (The Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, for example, during which American fighter jocks shot down over 400 Japanese aircraft in one day, is remembered as “The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.”)

Bowing to a combination of reality, desperation, and fanatical devotion to Dai Nippon and her divine emperor, Japanese planners led by Vice Adm. Ōnishi Takijirō, came up with a radical approach. What had once been a random act of self-sacrifice was transformed into a formal and lethal method of attack by the Imperial Navy. The Special Attack Corps was created to train pilots to use their aircraft as guided missiles. This group of fliers would be the modern version of the typhoon, or kamikaze (“divine wind”), that wiped out the Mongol invasion fleet en route to Japan in 1281.

The first organized suicide attacks occurred during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. From October 1944 to January 1945, during the Philippines campaign, kamikazes sank 22 Allied ships and damaged 112, prompting Ōnishi to conclude, “The men who can save the country are not military or political leaders. The salvation of Japan lies in the young people of twenty-five to thirty-five — or even younger — and their body-hitting spirit.”

By 1945, with most of the IJN in Davey Jones’ locker, greater reliance than ever was placed on these young pilots willing to die for their god emperor and become kikusui (“floating chrysanthemums”) in their national defense. With a final sake toast before taking off to their deaths, the kamikaze pilots sang their war song:

The airman’s color is the color of the cherry blossom
See, oh see, how the blossoms fall on the hills of Yoshino
If we are born proud sons of the Yamato race, let us die
Let us die with triumph, fighting in the sky.

On April 7, the first waves of suicide planes, Kikusui No. 1, lifted off from bases on Kyushu and Formosa and headed towards the enemy flotilla off Okinawa. A typical formation was three suicide planes, usually loaded with bombs or torpedoes for greater explosive effect, one fighter escort, and one observer. They would repeatedly change altitude to confuse monitoring U.S. picket ships, drop aluminum chaff to baffle radar signatures, and come in from many different directions to disperse CAP fighters and anti-aircraft. Untrained in air tactics, they were instructed to go straight in on a sprint at their targets.

And so it was that while the Tenth Army was still enjoying its brief calm before the storm on Okinawa, 60 miles out to sea, a new form of warfare would reach its apogee; the Big Blue Fleet supporting the landings with its dozens of carriers would be the primary target.

Beginning on April 7, the Navy found itself under attack from all sides by Japanese aircraft. The first line of defense was the CAP fighters. They rolled into the mass formations of inbound enemy planes and proceeded to shred one after another. They noticed that many didn’t even use evasive tactics but kept on at full throttle, heading straight into the fleet. (Fortunately, the superlative Corsair — arguably the finest piston-engine fighter of the war — could chase many of them down). Then, the outer ring of picket destroyers and destroyer escorts sent up sheets of anti-aircraft as the enemy aircraft either passed overhead on their way to the carriers or opted to aim for their small tormentors for a more certain kill. Given their size, Destroyers were targeted and sunk the most, thus fulfilling the Kikusui pledge, “One Plane, One Ship”. If the attackers managed to pierce the CAP and outer ring of AA, it was up to the gunners on the carriers, battleships, and cruisers to send up a curtain of lead to try and beat back what they saw as madmen flying those human bombs and coming straight at them.

The adrenaline-pumped American crews had never seen anything like it. During the first and most numerous Kikusui, over 700 Japanese planes roared in from every direction; 355 were kamikazes, while the rest were either escorts, observers, or conventional bombers.

Capt. Frank Manson, whose destroyer USS Laffey was hit several times but managed to stay afloat, recalled: “So many things were happening and so quickly that it was a little bit like a big boxer in a ring being hit to the chin and the side of the face and the body and everywhere else because we were catching it from so many different angles.”

Amid the chaos of swerving ships and gun blasts of every caliber filling the sky with black clouds of shell bursts, the beleaguered sailors could gauge the danger by which guns were firing. Writes historian Joseph Wheelan, “The firing of 5 inch guns [firing proximity-fused shells at medium range] meant that kamikazes were still a distance away. When the 40mm Bofor auto-cannons joined in, a kamikaze was targeting a sailor’s ship, and the sound of the 20mm guns was the signal to take cover.”

Capt. Manson continued: “You were praying that you would survive whatever the kind of explosion would come about. Your whole life flashed in front of you very quickly because you didn’t know if it would be minutes or even seconds before your life was snuffed out.”

The noise and chaos, as well as the physical and emotional strain on sailors who were always on high alert, was exhausting. The fight against the kamikazes was so grueling and mentally straining that some men broke under the pressure. Manson remembered, “One man was in a forty-millimeter mount and he’d been fighting against quite a number of planes that had come in but we had been hit in his area two or three times and all of a sudden with nobody understanding why he just yelled out ‘It’s hot today!’ and jumped over the side. And that was the last we ever saw of him.”

Lt. Charles Burrows on board USS Tennessee likened the helplessness one felt when they saw that a kamikaze was going to get through to “sitting in the middle of a railroad track while watching the locomotive come at you at 200 miles per hour. You’re certain it’s curtains.”

The suicide attacks were a daily event when the weather allowed; they came in the forms of fighters, dive bombers, twin-engine bombers, and even the rocket-propelled Ohka flying bombs, called “bakas” or “fools” by the Americans. Some attacks were individual sorties, and others, like Kikusui No. 2 on April 12, consisted of 380 planes, 185 of which were kamikazes. Throughout the campaign, bomb-laden aircraft screamed out of the sky and slammed into Allied ships, causing terrible destruction and inflicting heavy casualties. Between April 7 and June 22, over 1,400 suicide planes would sortie against Allied shipping both at sea and in the Hagushi sector. By the time the battle was over, the Navy would suffer 36 ships sunk, 368 damaged, with some 5,000 sailors dead and as many wounded; 15 times the number killed at Midway.

Beyond the deaths and destruction, probably the worst aspect of the kamikaze raids, given the nature of their attacks with planes laden with fuel and bombs, were the ghastly wounds suffered by the survivors. Bert Cooper, a Navy corpsman, treated the sole survivor of a gun mount hit by a crashed plane. He was burned so badly, Cooper recalled, that “the only thing pink you could see were his lips…he was just covered with black burns all over.” The dying boy whispered to him, “Doc, I’m an orphan. Who will remember me?” Cooper fought back tears. “I’ll remember you,” he promised. “Every day of my life.

The IJN took the concept of the suicide attack in perhaps the ultimate expression of the Japanese militarists’ desperation when they dispatched the 72,000-ton battleship Yamato, the largest ever constructed, from Kyushu to steam for Okinawa. As Japan was severely lacking in fuel, the officers and crew on board knew this would be a one-way mission. The great warship was ordered to sail into the waters off Hagushi and beach herself while training her massive 18.1-inch guns and a wall of 6 and 5-inch secondary weapons on the landing zone to act as an artillery platform until destroyed. But she was soon picked up and trailed by U.S. submarines, and Mitscher’s carriers turned into the wind to launch over 300 planes to intercept her just 120 miles out from Japan.

On April 7, as if to declare once and for all that the age of the big battleship had passed into history, over 300 U.S. Helldiver bombers dove down on her from 20,000 feet while Avenger torpedo planes skimmed the surface to drop their “pickle” into the water that was frothing with AA from Yamato and her destroyer escorts. After a punishing raid that hit Yamato with no fewer than 11 torpedoes and six bombs, the ship capsized and exploded, taking 3,055 of her 3,332 crew, along with her captain and fleet commander, with her to the bottom of the sea.

Although the U.S. Navy made quick work of the last expression of Japanese sea power, on land, the fight for Okinawa was degenerating into a gruesome battle of attrition for which every yard was costing the lives of young GIs. And as April turned to May, it would be the Marines up next to enter the kill zone.

The battle was far from over. And then the rains came.

* * *

Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. Follow him on Substack and X/Twitter.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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